Re: Scripts

From: "Christopher B Wright" <faceloran@...>

| How many of you have scripts?

My conlang, Tech, which is STILL far from completion, is written various with
Ge'ez (by Ethiopian Christians), Arabic (by Muslims), Latin (by "Western"
Christians, i.e. Catholics and Protestants -- but this is usually an obscure
Techian Creole based on English and French), and Hebrew (by Jews, who speak
Judeo-Tech).

I have made attempts at a unique script/alphabet, based more or less on
Greek-Coptic. Or how 'bout this: a form of Hangul derived from Egyptian
characters instead of Chinese, i.e. pictographical phonetic syllable blocks?

| How many of you use diacriticals as vowels in your scripts?

Ge'ez modifies base characters for each vowel; Arabic uses small marks above or
below consonant letters. Latin and Greek have dedicated letters for vowels, and
some letters can be both a vowel and a consonant. Diacritics in the latter two
cases mark shifts in sounds, accents (tone in Classical Tech, stress in Medieval
and Modern Tech) and other minor things, along the lines of polytonic Greek.

| How many of you have null letters (letters that don't represent a sound)
| to deal with the problem of diphthongs / multiple vowels per consonant?

Well, the symbol for the glottal stop (alif in Arabic, one series in Ge'ez) is
kind of a "null consonant" if used initially, but it too has a real phonemic
value in other cases.

But there is a feature in Tech that is rare among the natlangs (it's found in
Irish and Scots Gaelic): a form of metathesis often resulting in palatization or
labiovelarization of consonants resulting from a shift of CVCV > CVVC > CV'C, if
the first vowel is long and the first syllable is open. This is something I call
"condensation" or "compression". It not only creates new vowels and more
consonantal nuances, but also has a practical value of shortening words. Also,
short vowels in open syllables are usually lost, except short /i/ and /u/
palatize and labiovelarize the preceding consonant, respectively.

(The merged vowels may have been a diphthong in an earlier stage of the
language, but eventually they became monophthongs. The possible combinations: aa
ai au @a @i @u ea ei eu ia ii iu oa oi ou ua ui uu. The resulting "condensed
vowels" result from umlaut and "breaking", found in Germanic languages.)

And God speed on your work!

~Danny~


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